Famed screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and theoretical physicist Brian Greene dissect time as we know it. What is the smallest unit of time, and what does it look like? For starters, you should stop looking at the clock, and start looking at the universe.

How do you make sense of a strange city and turn a bewildering maze of streets into a map that’s instantly informative to a confused visitor? Mike Parker hits the city streets to find out what makes the ideal map for steering us through the urban jungle. He meets the man who has made it his mission to single-handedly create a new map of Manchester, and discovers how digesting the entire London A to Z makes cabbies’ brains bigger.

Creating beautiful web design is largely a matter of mastering a handful of simple techniques. The best designs employ systems of color, contrast, typography, and white space to achieve hierarchy, balance, and rhythm. The rest is just ingenuity and creativity. Matthew will review dozens of great and nearly great sites, explaining how to raise the bar on your next design.

In our first “Workflows” episode we talk with Merlin Mann, or as David calls him, the “Hero of Nerds.” Merlin discussed how he uses his Mac for his work and the applications he uses to be more productive. This extra long episode is packed with geeky goodness.

Dan Benjamin interviews Gina Trapani. Gina is an author, blogger, programmer. We discuss the story and inspiration that lead to the creation Lifehacker (and the “persona” behind it), making the transition from code to writing, the daily grind, deadlines, and posting quotas, Smarterware, Think Tank, her self-publishing experiment, consistency and building traffic, and the importance of having a launchpad.

Dan is joined by John Gruber of Daring Fireball and Craig Hockenberry the creator of Twitterrific at Icon Factory. We talk about the Tweetie acquisition by Twitter, the iPhone OS 4, iAds, Game Center, and more.

Jim Coudal of Coudal Partners drops in by phone to talk about the new and emerging advertising marketplace and ecosystem Apple is creating.